If you want to play Bloodlines the way the developers originally intended...
Yeah, Troika must have intended that Bloodlines was released unfinished and buggy. Or maybe not, as Tim Cain wrote this (
http://books.google.com/books?id=lroZsP4zyIYC&pg=PA102):
"Activision had us work on the game until a certain point, and then they froze the project. We'd have continued to improve the game, especially by fixing bugs and finishing incomplete areas, but they didn't let that happen." and "Activision had become impatient and wanted the game shipped as soon as possible. They wanted to cut areas of complexity, we wanted to maintain quality, and the game was caught in a lopsided tug-of-war. In the end, Activision “won”, and the game was shipped with many bugs, cinematic cutscene issues, and incomplete areas."
Nice fanfic
No, just follow the link and get yourself a reading sample. If you can't here is the full section he wrote about Bloodlines:
Gamers at work
Chapter 6 | Tim Cain: Cofounder, Troika Games
Ramsay: Troika also had some trouble with release timing. How did Valve's
embargo on Vampire impact the company?
Cain: Well, the embargo caused several problems. First, while the game was
held until Half-Life 2 shipped, we were also not allowed to keep the title in
development. Activision had us work on the game until a certain point, and
then they froze the project. We'd have continued to improve the game,
especially by fixing bugs and finishing incomplete areas, but they didn't let
that happen. They picked a version as the gold master for duplication, and
then they held that version close until the ship date. We fixed some bugs,
but they didn't want to pass new builds to quality assurance.
Second, while our game was being held, Valve continued to make improve-
ments to the Source engine — improvements we couldn't add to our game.
It was frustrating to play Half-Life 2 and see advancements in physics, mod-
eling, facial animation, and other features that our game did not have.
Finally, the embargo really demoralized the team. They had finished a game
that couldn't be shipped, or changed, or talked about. And when Vampire
was shipped, the game was compared unfavorably to the only other Source
game on the market. Needless to say, we lost some good people during that
time. They quit in frustration and went elsewhere.
Ramsay: Even if there was a need for the title to be published before Half-
Life 2, Valve made that impossible. Why did Activision freeze the project?
Cain: Just to be clear. I came over to the Vampire team after the first two
years of development, and my role was to provide programming leadership
and work on areas of the game code that needed immediate help, such as
creature artificial intelligence and file-packing issues. So, I never
interacted with Activision during development.
With that said, the Vampire game had been under development for three
years. While that's not a long time for a role-playing game - Fallout had
taken three and half years to develop, and that was a simpler game made
almost a decade earlier — Activision had become impatient and wanted the
game shipped as soon as possible. They wanted to cut areas of complexity,
we wanted to maintain quality, and the game was caught in a lopsided tug-
of-war. In the end, Activision “won”, and the game was shipped with many
bugs, cinematic cutscene issues, and incomplete areas.
Ramsay: Can you give me some examples of these problems?
Cain: Some of the most egregious examples included the game crashing
when a Nosferatu player character finished a particular map. This was caused
by a bad map value in a script that teleported a Nosferatu to a different map
than other player characters because Nosferatu were not allowed to appear
in public places. The crash was discovered after the embargo, along with the
disheartening fact that no one in quality assurance at Activision had ever
tested the Nosferatu character.
We were also working on smoothing out the walking animations of charac-
ters during in-game cinematic sequences. The embargo occurred during the
middle of this process, which left a great many characters skating or stutter-
ing during those sequences. And the warrens near the end of the game
were barely populated with creatures when development was frozen. No
balancing or dialogue was added at all.
I don't have to restate how demoralizing these issues were to the team. All
of these problems were easily solvable with more time. But that time was
not available.
Ramsay: Was there any ill will toward Valve?
Cain: No, we weren't really angry with Valve. They made their deal with
Activision, and part of that deal was that any Source-based game had to be
shipped after their Half-Life 2. Valve had the luxury of pushing out their ship
date repeatedly — and they did — to ensure that their game was great. We
were hoping for the same luxury, but Activision didn't grant it.
Now Activision, on the other hand, did get a bit of our ire. When we dis-
covered that we could not ship before Valve, we never imagined that Activi-
sion would ship Vampire on the same day as Half-Life 2. For several reasons,
a much better idea would have been to ship Vampire a couple of months
later. It would have given us time to polish our game with a stable engine. It
would have given the consumer something else to buy that used the Source
engine after Half-Life 2. And a later release would also not have put us in di-
rect competition for consumer dollars during our important first few weeks
on store shelves, because we all knew that consumers were going to choose
Half-Life 2 over Vampire. And, really, was the cost of a few more months of
development really that much more than the years we had already spent on
the game? No. I may not be a businessman, but that seemed like a bad
choice on Activision’s part.
Ramsay: Sounds like a reasonable solution to me. Did Leonard or Jason
make these arguments to Activision?
Cain: Leonard did a lot of the interacting with Activision, and he did suggest
this course of action many times. As far as I knew, Activision either ignored
the suggestion or complained about how much time Vampire had already
taken. They really did not want to put any more money into the game than
they absolutely had to, but at the same time, they demanded triple-A quality.
It was quite schizophrenic.
Ramsay: In the end, this ordeal brought about the collapse of Troika? What
happened after Vampire shipped?
Cain: Leonard, Jason, and I went looking for a new contract even before
Vampire shipped, since we were done a few months before. Leonard pur-
sued Fallout 3, which ultimately went to Bethesda, who outbid us.
! At least 10.7 looks as stable and complete as I can possible make it and the details we were fixing lately are so minor most people will indeed not notice them. Which isn't due to my "autistic vision", but due to people reporting any small issue they can still find. As long as they do and I can fix them, I will 
. And sometimes other things break because Bloodlines is complex and hard to mod with no source and no official SDK.
!
